Thomas Was Alone

These days, it's no longer revolutionary for a game to use its gameplay systems as narrative devices.  But doing something really well is always rare, and while Thomas Was Alone is pretty visibly influenced by Portal and Braid, it's influenced by their smartest aspects.  Like those games, it uses the foundation of the puzzle-platformer genre as a place to build a cleverly cohesive fusion of gameplay and narrative.

From Portal, TWA gets the idea of making a story out of its own construction.  Most puzzle games are set in stylized, often deliberately "computery" worlds, so the player just accepts their conventions without too many questions; no one's going to ask whose engagement ring these three matching gems are for.  But Portal was set in a realistic 3D environment, so it needed some explanation for why the universe was a series of just-barely-transcendable barriers.   The game's story of a person who had to make her way through computer-operated tests was a series of gentle pokes at the fourth wall, jokingly putting the player in the same position as the character, though with a bit less risk of falling into a fire pit.

Thomas Was Alone is visually nearer to Tetris than Portal, which makes it a touching act of gratuitous creativity that that designer Matt Bithell gave it one of the better game narratives this year.  We would have just accepted that the little dots have to get to the outline because the outline is the right size for a little dot, but TWA turns the progression through levels into drama.  TWA's tale of computer-generated dots getting to the end of a program raises the bar on Portal's metafiction by openly acknowledging that all its characters are not just in a computer-generated environment but are themselves computer-generated.  There's a thrillingly modernist, even Marxist materialism in such frankness.

It helps that the story is told with a narrative compression that a lot of big-budget games could learn from; there's just enough information to spark the player's imagination without drowning us in irrelevant detail.  And despite the deliberately crude visuals, Bithell cleverly built character traits around each dot's abilities--- the jump-assist character is too eager to please, the low-jumper is jealous, and so on---so that I found myself somehow feeling like each dot looked exactly like that character would look.  Which is a neat trick when they're all a bunch of colored pixels arranged in an inexpressive line!

Better still is TWA's use of game mechanics as vital narrative elements.  As the verb tense suggests, Thomas Was Alone is a game about the shift from solitude to society, with all the attendant risks and rewards: companionship, mutual aid, obligation, betrayal, and the simple irritation of having to deal with people who aren't like you.  You start the game controlling a single character, and you're gradually joined by more as the game shifts from heroic quest to ensemble drama.  Initially, as I had to switch between multiple characters in the quest for the goal, I found myself instinctively trying to play like I did in the early levels---get a dot to its goal, go back and get the next dot to its goal, and so on.  But it quickly becomes obvious that the dots can only get to the end by working together, and the act of discovering that the characters must work as a team nicely forces identification with the characters learning the very same lesson.

As gamers, we're used to investing personality into what are really just a bunch of lights.  Usually, designers work to obscure that from us, lest we become ashamed of our anthropomorphizing sentimentality; Thomas Was Alone makes that the point of the game.  Even more striking, it does so while making a bold attack on the thematic foundations of typical video games.   Most single-player gaming is inadvertently, and perhaps inescapably, driven by a sort of sociopathy.  Everything you meet in the world must answer only one question: "How can you benefit me?"  With gentle, sweet-natured good humor, Thomas Was Alone nudges the player to a much more human question: "How can we help each other?"

Thirty Flights of Loving

I wouldn't want every game– or even most games– to be like Thirty Flights of Loving.  But I'm really glad that Thirty Flights of Loving is.

Brendon Chung is sort of the Marcel Duchamp of video games; he's less about providing the pleasures in which his chosen medium specializes and more about creating artifacts that force the viewer to question the medium's definition.  Like Duchamp (and unlike most of his imitators), Chung's art is saved from sterility by his seemingly instinctive aesthetic talent.

TFoL is pretty willingly an interactive short story rather than a game.  You run from place to place absorbing narrative information, with nothing to really test your ability.  Even in the one area where you get to shoot stuff, it quickly becomes obvious that the bang-bang is just there to propitiate gamer reflexes, with no real impact on how the story progresses.

So it's exactly the kind of thing that inspires Steam reviewers to grumble about "hipsters".  Previous interactive narrative experiments, like Dear Esther and The Path, were frustrating even to my artfaggy self, as their eschewing of combat or puzzles seemed to be part and parcel of a generally dour dislike of kicks, joy, entertainment value... In short, they seemed to have a sneering contempt for fun, which games should be!

Like those games, TFoL wants to tell you a story rather than challenge you to a battle, but unlike them, Chung understands that a story is fundamentally a machine for creating delight.  You'll only be playing it for about 15 minutes, but those 15 minutes are full of color, music, groovy sights, funny jokes, never-seen-that-before techniques, and charmingly irrelevant tangents.

The immersiveness of the experience is cemented by the sturdy reliability of  its stories: a heist gone wrong and a love triangle, two templates guaranteed to rope in just about anyone who's ever wanted to be rich or have sex. Because those stories are so familiar, the viewer can't help but try to guess at much of the information that Chung revels in not providing.  And if you're the sort of pervert who likes having their brain coochie-coo'ed, coy narrative elision is a potent fan dance.

Trying to figure out what happened in between the game's smash cuts is far more engaging than navigating any of the game's spaces.  Which suggests that TFoL is not so much eliminating challenge as shifting where it happens.  In most games, getting from one end of the level to the other is difficult while following the story is (insultingly) easy, and in TFoL it's just the opposite.   Games are defined by their most challenging aspect, so while most video games are about figuring out fighting patterns with some story as background, TFoL is really a game about figuring out the shape of a tale with some running around corridors as background.

In this brave new era of theory-informed, progressive game design, even a number of big-budget titles have experimented with allusive storytelling.  Though Bioshock conveyed plenty of narrative through bog-standard voice-overs, many of the most interesting subplots, like Fontaine's bible-smuggling operation, were suggested by environmental details and other small aspects of the game. The faint whispers of story were the most interesting thing about Dark Souls, imbuing its battles with faint suggestions of tragedy like a utopian monument fallen into ruins.

But in every case, the suggestive storytelling never quite becomes gameplay, because it lacks the pass/fail mechanical demands that more or less define what's important to a player.  What's needed now is a game where figuring out the story has in-game consequences, making the act of figuring out a story inherent to the game.  Perhaps a role-playing game where you interact with NPC's differently based on conclusions you've made about their background, with consequences for different guesses?  Of course, such a mechanic means a developer has to commit to a right interpretation of story hints, which risks undoing exactly what's so interesting about these subtle fragments.  Is there a way to make the act of figuring out a story as open, compelling, and challenging as running through a combat zone?